Aurora
by Niggle
Summary: Nighttime, dreams and a little fatherson bonding.


He's been here as long as he can remember. Since the beginning. There was something before, but it is too distant for him to recall. He only remembers the place he is in now: a small room, barely large enough for the team of five scientists to stand around, talking about him. They do that often. They don't realize that he has learned to decipher their words. He has lost his own. The memory faded with the memory of that other place.  
  
The room is a box-like cell, white-walled and antiseptic. They like to keep conditions as sterile as possible, though he cannot fathom why. The alloy of choice is titanium. They've wrapped thick, massive chains of it around him. His arms and legs are pinned by six inches of the strongest metal they can manufacture, held in place with electromagnets that guzzle wattage like water.  
  
He has twisted and warped their alloys more times than he can count, but he has never broken them. When he comes close, they just invent new ones. As he adapts, so do they. But he knows that he will win. They cannot hold him forever. He's fantasized a million times about what he will do when he finally escapes. He has a lot of time to kill, and it helps to fill the long hours of mind-numbing boredom. They've already done most of the tests they can devise. There seems to be nothing left for them to do. So they just keep him there, controlled and safe.  
  
They use that word a lot, safe. They talk about the safety of the American people, the safety of the workers who watch him twenty-four seven. How safe are the quarantine procedures? How safe are the chains? He will show them how safe they are. He'll go after the tall doctor first and rip his head off. He can do that, too. He can simply tear the head right from the body. Skin, muscle and bone - so fragile. No effort at all. That will wipe the officious smirk off of the head doctor's face. Or maybe not. Maybe it will be frozen there forever, impotent and empty.  
  
He will teach them fear. He will teach them what it is to be afraid, to know that no matter how strong or smart you are, you still lose that final battle. To know that another has absolute control over the length of your life and the manner of your death. They do not know, but he will teach them.  
  
He is getting stronger; the chains are getting weaker. One day soon, they will break.  
  
He sits up quickly, his heart beating with the wild cadence of nightmare. The familiar shadows of his darkened room seem to close in around him and he fumbles for the light, barely managing to get it on without destroying it in his haste. The wan yellow glow drives some of the night away and memory of the dream begins to slowly fade. But while the details are disappearing, the raw horror remains so vivid in his mind that it leaves a foul taste in his mouth.  
  
He knows he'll never get back to sleep so he gets out of bed and makes his way to the bathroom, switching on hall lights as he goes. He lets the normality of taking a shower and brushing his teeth and attending to all those little hygienic concerns soothe the harsh, disquieting echo of the dream, regulating it to a far-off corner of non-reality. But when he has finished and dressed, and there is nothing left to do, he feels it seeping back into his consciousness. Dawn is still several deep hours away, and with it the comforting security of real life. The fields are still wreathed in shadow, the animals still and quiet; all the earth seems cold and dead, lending an illusion of complete solitude.  
  
He goes downstairs to find something in his mother's cookbook that will take more than two hours to make for breakfast. When he enters the kitchen, he finds his father sitting at the table, staring at the steaming cup between his hands. The Mr. Coffee on the counter is still percolating, filling the room with its quiet, calming sound and rich aroma. The light from the fixture on the ceiling seems to hold the kitchen in a kind of insular peace surrounded by the silent, deadly dark outside. Jonathan Kent looks up as he hears his son come in.  
  
"I thought teenagers needed at least twelve hours of sleep to function properly."  
  
"Bad dream."  
  
"Me too. Wanna talk about it?"  
  
He shakes his head.  
  
"Me either."  
  
Clark retrieves his Marvin the Martian mug from the cupboard and Sneaks-a- Cup. His father's brooding compliments his own as he takes a seat. They sit there in silence, each occupied by separate, but similar thoughts. Though they share little in the way of genetics, they wear identical expressions of melancholy; a common life, a common love, binds them more surely than any blood ties, father and son, each shaping the other.  
  
They wait. Tangible expectation grows in the air as time passes at a crawl. They say nothing, as if spoken words will chase the sun back below the horizon. Dawn is coming, and with it a release from the eerie, mysterious darkness of a night plagued by nightmare. They huddle in their tentative fortress, stubbornly denying memories of troubled sleep. The minutes grow interminable. But still they hold their ground, awaiting the return to light, and to life. 


End file.
